Last update - 00:00 05/03/2007
Bereaved parents: Tombstones must read that sons fell in war
By Amiram Barkat and Nir Hasson, Haaretz Correspondents
Parents of soldiers killed in last summer's war in Lebanon are demanding that the Defense Ministry allow them to inscribe on the tombstone that they were killed in "the second Lebanon war."
The parents argue that the current inscription, which states that the soldiers were 'fell in battle in southern Lebanon,' serves the government's policy of not declaring the conflict a war because of political and economic ramifications.
The public council for the commemoration of fallen soldiers said it will shortly decide whether to recommend to Defense Minister Amir Peretz to change the inscriptions on the gravestones.
The custom in military cemeteries is to have standard inscriptions on tombstones, determined by a special department at the Defense Ministry. The text for inscriptions on tombs of the fallen from the 2006 war was decided on a few days after fighting started in consultations with representatives of the Defense Ministry, the Israel Defense Forces, and Yad Lebanim, the organization of the parents of the fallen soldiers. The Yad Lebanim director, who was at the meeting, said those participating did not yet realize a war was underway. "There was a proposal to write 'killed in action' but in the end it was decided to write 'fell in battle in southern Lebanon,' which sounded more heroic."
From the outbreak of the war and until the cease-fire, 117 IDF soldiers were killed.
A month after the end of the war, the inscription came to the attention of Professor Yossi Katz, who was collecting material for a book on the history of the military tombstone. Nothing initially came of a query by Katz to the head of the IDF commemoration unit, but recently he was joined by a number of bereaved parents, led by Moshe Muskal, father of the late Rafanael Muskal. Muskal believes the text is an attempt by the military and political establishment to repress the public memory of the war.
In contrast, Atara Kokhba, the mother of the fallen soldier Ran Kokhba, told Haaretz that she was opposed to bereaved parents intervening in decisions of the Defense Ministry. "What is customary seems right to us." Sergio Sheinbrom, the father of fallen soldier Yaniv Sheinbrom, said he would not change the inscription on his son's tombstone, but added that the desire of parents who wanted the inscription to read 'the second Lebanon war' should be respected.
The chairman of Yad Lebanim, Eli Ben-Shem, told Haaretz on Sunday that he believed the public council for the commemoration of fallen soldiers, of which he is a member and which is to deliberate on the matter over the next two weeks, would vote unanimously to change the inscription, including those on the gravestones of the soldiers who fell in the kidnapping incident before the war.
In a meeting two weeks ago between Peretz and the bereaved parents, Peretz pledged that by Independence Day an official name would be selected for the war and medals would be distributed to the soldiers who took part in it. A committee headed by Major General Yishai Bar, head of the Military Appeals Tribunal, is seeking a name. One suggestion was to group all the names of the fallen since the first Lebanon war that began in 1982 - the War for the Peace of Galilee - and until last summer's war under one name, such as "the struggle against Hezbollah." Another possibility is to call the war by the name of the operation that began it, known as Operation Change of Direction. The bereaved parents have angrily rejected both names.